Yesterday I posted a critique of a column by Kavita Narayan in The Humanist, published by the American Humanist Association. The column basically took the stand that all kids who want to transition should be free to do so at any age, receiving full “affirmative care”, with surgery and hormones if they so desire. It was full of omissions and misconceptions, and you might have a look at it again (yes, it’s a bit long). The column was brought to my attention by a reader who wishes to remain unnamed for obvious reasons, and I mistakenly said he/she was a member of the AHA, which he/she is not. But it doesn’t matter, as you don’t have to be an AHA member to see the problems with Narayan’s piece.
I asked for permission to publish the reader’s letter to AHA, which I got. It was sent to the AHA’s Executive Director (Fish Stark) and President (Candace Gorham), and here it is (bolding is the author’s)
From: NAME REDACTED
Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2025 11:19 AM
To: Fish Stark <fstark@americanhumanist.org>; Candace Gorham <cgorham@americanhumanist.org>
Subject: Beyond the BinaryAttn: Candace Gorham, Fish Stark
I do not believe in any gods but I do believe in human duty to not harm others.
That’s why I find the claim that your organization supports science is hollow, in the light of what you published today in The Humanist. In particular, the article “Beyond the Binary: Humanism, Gender, and the Fight for Inclusive Healthcare” supports the approach to Trans health care where science and compassion take a back seat to ideology and propaganda.
It would be OK if there were no harm in it, but removing genitals of youngsters, who at some point in their youthful explorations expressed a transitory dissatisfaction with their biological sex, is NOT harmless. It leaves them scarred for life and unable to have sexual satisfaction ever. It is unbecoming of a humanist to promote a treatment that disables for life, even if meaningful consent could be obtained, which it cannot be due to the age of the victim.
A safe approach to transition would be possible if medical professionals (and not activists or medical profiteers) were involved in finding out if there is an actual gender dysphoria that does not go away with maturity. But that’s the problem is it not? Psychiatrists have for a long time refused to treat young people because so many aberrations happen in the mental life of teenagers. But that was not good enough for Trans activists, so they replaced professional judgment with a cavalier approach of transitioning every kid that would be amenable to it.
I am eagerly awaiting the coming of lawsuits by de-transitioners, who were approached as kids by trans activists, but now begin to understand the irreversible nature of the treatment and what it took away from them, permanently.
Regards,
NAME REDACTED
Granted, Narayan’s column didn’t represent the official position of the AHA on gender transitions, but President Fish Stark, in a comment on my post, said this:
Hi Jerry,
This is Fish Stark, Executive Director of the AHA.
You of all people should know very well that an opinion piece that’s published in an organization’s magazine is not the same thing as an official statement from that organization.
You don’t have to guess at what we think about these issues. We wrote it down here:
https://americanhumanist.org/featured/statement-from-american-atheist-humanist-freethought-and-secular-groups-affirming-commitment-to-protecting-lgbtq-rights/We have only received one complaint about the piece, which I personally responded to. To be very clear – since I hear you like facts – this person is not a member of the AHA, nor have they ever been, so I hope you’ll correct this.
Regardless, I encourage you to publish my response in full; I stand by it. [Note: his response to my reader ‘s letter to the AHA is below.]
Best,
Fish
Have a look at the link he offers, and you’ll understand why I responded to Fish’s comment like this:
Well, in fact the statement you mention by the AHA says exactly NOTHING about these issues, so no, the statement does not enlighten me at all. The statement is simply supporting LGBTQ+ rights, something I already said I supported. And, in fact, in this comment you say nothing about the issues I discuss in my piece.
And if the AHA disagrees with what Narayan said, which is very important given the potential harm of affirmative care, I think you should enlighten us all by telling us that IN THE MAGAZINE.
I stand corrected on whether the person who wrote you was a member of the AHA, but that is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that your organization published what is in effect an op-ed that puts its imprimatur on affirmative care of the most aggressive sort. And you should have at least done some fact-checking of your op-ed pieces. That piece was unforgivably sloppy and left out a bunch of relevant material (i.e., most non-treated GD people actually come out as gay, there is no good evidence for elevated suicide rates, etc) that a decent editor would have caught. I think you should be ashamed of what you published because it could potentially cause harm.
Every decent newspaper vets its op-eds rigorously: I ought to know because I have written enough of them. The AHA apparently does not, and so I was forced to take issue with it.
At any rate, Fish encouraged me to publish his response that he emailed to my correspondent. I wasn’t going to publish it without permission, but now I have that. The reader told me that, “I think you can safely say that in their reply, AHA affirmed the safety of current practices regarding transition.” And that’s absolutely right.
So, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and those who don’t hold with such nouns, here is Fish Stark’s reply to my correspondent’s letter to AHA.
If what we published in The Humanist never offended anyone, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs, so thanks, I suppose, for the affirmation.I’m all for rational discussions of the best way to navigate the complex question of how our healthcare system can best serve young transgender people, but it’s hard to have a rational discussion in the face of sweeping and incorrect claims like the one that all people who undergo sex change surgeries are “unable to have sexual satisfaction ever.”
In any event, I’m not understanding the source of your disagreement, because the article affirms the need for medical professionals to be “involved in finding out if there is an actual gender dysphoria that does not go away with maturity” in any situation that involves children. It sounds like we agree that medical transitioning is an appropriate response to non-transitory dysphoria and that comprehensive assessments by medical professionals are necessary to determine whether medical intervention is the correct course of action for youth. The great news is that this is already standard practice, backed up by peer-reviewed research that indicates regret rates for gender-affirming surgeries are among the lowest for any surgical procedures performed in this country.There, as elsewhere, the author links to peer-reviewed research to support their argument. You’re welcome to contest the science itself or their interpretation of it, but our editorial requirement that authors ground their claims about the human body and the natural world and scientific research was enforced here and will continue to be.It is indeed our job as humanists to prevent harm to others. The question is whether the harm done by a more restrictive approach, which would limit people from transitioning who need it, is worse than any harms that may occur in the current system. This author believed so and wrote, in my opinion, a compelling case for their argument backed up by clear evidence. We’d consider other points of view as well, but they’d have to bring more to the table than vague and dubious claims that trans activists are approaching children and trying to “convert” them.
Warmly,Fish
I’ll give my own response to Fish’s words here. First, it largely neglects what I said in my column. While it sounds good, and proffers humanistic sentiments to trans people, it doesn’t really answer a number of questions that are raised by my piece. I’ll just number the questions below; these are addressed to Fish:
1.) What does the AHA construe as “transitory” dysphoria? If a thirteen-year-old girl feels she’s a boy, does the AHA recommend a five-year waiting period until hormones and/or surgery are given? Or does any child or adolescent have, as Narayan said, “This is where humanism can make a unique impact. Unlike traditional religions that may treat gender diversity as a moral debate, humanism begins from a different premise: that every individual has inherent worth, and that self-determination is not a privilege, but a right.” But if any individual of any age has a “right” to “self-determination,” why did your get your knickers in a twist when Dawkins suggested, as a thought experiment, that Rachel Dolezal might conceivably have a “right” to identify as black if she were white. You may remember that this is one reason the AHA revoked Dawkins’s 2006 “Humanist of the Year Award.”
2.) You say this:
“comprehensive assessments by medical professionals are necessary to determine whether medical intervention is the correct course of action for youth. The great news is that this is already standard practice
That is not true. It is a practice, but it is not standard practice in the medical/psychiatric community, and I think you know that. At least in blue states, any kid who wants to get affirmative care, including hormones and surgery, will find it fairly easy to do, even if they are way below eighteen years old. The standard practice for several years has been to “believe the kid”; and if you do, it’s not long until someone gets a prescription for hormones and, if wanted, permission for surgery.
3.) Narayan’s article does not link to all the relevant peer-reviewed research in the area, as I pointed out. It doesn’t mention, for instance, that if affirmative care is not given, most children with gender dysphoria (GD) come out as gay. That is important, and belies your view that kids with persistent gender dysphoria should indeed be injected with hormones and sometimes given surgery. The fact that most people who transition say they’re happy with it may be true, but given the “buyer’s remorse” phenomenon, I am not willing to believe that nearly all of them are. Many become life-long patients with problems such as sterility and other issues that come with hormone replacement. Further, the article distorts the issue of suicidality, which in the best study known (neglected by you and Narayan), gender dysphoria, whether or not it is addressed medically, has no effect on suicidality or suicide rates because of the conflation of GD with other psychiatric issues that are connected with suicide
4.) Puberty blockers, the essential first step in giving children time to see if their dysphoria is more than “transitory,” are not known to be reversible or safe over one’s lifetime. There is sufficient lack of evidence for their safety that several countries have made their use only clinical or experimental. It will be a while until we know their long-term effects. Neglecting to mention this is of course dangerous. And since virtually everyone has finished puberty by age 18, there is really no need to give puberty blockers at all. Does the AHA agree? You don’t say and we don’t know.
In the end, you make a lot of nice noises but avoid speaking about the hard issues of transitioning: the ubiquity of problems with “affirmative care”, the cavalier response to lower age limits for such care or of parental consent, the potential dangers of puberty blockers, and, above all, the inability of children of adolescents to weigh the pros and cons of medical intervention—intervention that may affect a young person’s life forever.
If the AHA is serious about what you say, they should add these caveats to its published statement about protecting LGBTQ+ rights, which does not address these issues. Nor does it address certain trans “rights” that are deeply controversial, like the “right” of trans-identified males to compete in women’s athletics, the “right” of trans-identified males to serve as rape counselors or officials in battered women’s shelter’s if biological women don’t want them, the “right” of trans-identified males to display their penises in women’s locker rooms, and the “right” of trans-identified males to be put in women’s prisons. After all, you seem to agree with Narayan’s view that everybody has the “right” to be recognized as whatever they think they are. Surely you are not obtuse enough to know the problems this would cause.
Which brings us back to your shameful penalizing of Dawkins for simply raising that issue as a thought question. I know the AHA is too cowardly to give him back the award, which he deserved, but I can say that many of us pulled away from the AHA when you did that, for it was simply an instance of virtue signaling.
So Fish leads of with this in his response?
“If what we published in The Humanist never offended anyone, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs, so thanks, I suppose, for the affirmation.”
People are not “offended”…they are legitimately questioning the shoddy journalism! Is he actually trying to spin accurate observations of the poor quality of the op-ed into evidence that they are doing a great job?
Now that sounds really….Fishy!
Agree. Fish leading off with “offended” is also a red herring (ha ha). The anonymous critic didn’t call that column offensive: s/he called it hollow, unbecoming, and cavalier, and labeled it (correctly) as propaganda.
Fish could have just said we expect readers and members to disagree with some opinions expressed in The Humanist, but instead he wanted to label the disagreement as unreasonable by giving it an emotional tinge. This is bad faith.
Yes very bad faith indeed…I was like holy mackerel that was a bad response…
I see what you did there.
Bravo.
…
OK, this is sticking in my mind big time :
AHA President Fish : “It is indeed our job as humanists to prevent harm to others. ”
… that’s all – just highlighting that – but I’m going to look around for such ideas in already-published writing. Very, very intoxicating notion. Being in charge of preventing harm. Catcher in the Rye, Hippocratic oath, come to mind immediately. Probably an enormous theme in literature going back for ages.
Can’t resist :
AHA President Fish : “..self-determination is not a privilege, but a right.”
This popped in my head and I couldn’t resist, because this comes up a lot.
“Self-determination” is an absolutely true, core principle of the United States and Common Sense Realism. A right “endowed” (or, perhaps, intrinsic ) to life experience as we know it.
Experience is the best teacher
-Julius Caesar
Commentaries on the Civil War
46 B.C.
But what blends truth with falsehood?
dialectic
Here, the dialectic is subverting Common Sense Realism by forwarding Queer Theory doctrinal belief – an alchemical invention without evidence – as replacement for individual, self-determination.
The beliefs are supplied – not self-determined.
This can get real crazy because they can say Common Sense Realism was also a belief system that was supplied to any given individual – therefore Queer Theory is all good and new and improved Common Sense Realism.
Dawkins’s question was perfectly reasonable, and an interesting one. I, for one, came to be sympathetic to Dolezal, even as others sought to demonize her. The logic is inescapable. Why can’t she identify as a different race than the one to which she was “assigned” at birth?
I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but as a humanist (not an AHA member), I can’t help but be concerned that medical or surgical treatments—some of them dramatic and irreversible—provided to underage youth might be doing them a disservice. With almost their entire lives ahead of them, why not wait until they are at least 18? Provide them with counseling. Let them dress and present themselves in the way they desire. But let them test their commitment thoroughly before doing things that they cannot reverse. Surely this is what doctors do with other situations. Their first commitment is to do no harm.
Agreed. Let kids grow up and explore identities freely before terraforming their bodies to fit an identity that may or may not be the one they choose to keep as adults.
The reason given for early hormonal treatment is that without it, the body (of male sex) would masculinize further in the course of puberty, which would likely cause distress for the GD patient.
The question is if this distress is balanced by the risk of irreversible medical issues, some of which would be difficult to comprehend to a child without making a deep dive into understanding human sexuality.
Mind you, when I read in the letter at the start,
I was surprised. It made me wonder what my wife, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, has been up to when she has gone to work these last 37 years since finishing her residency?
“Nor does it address certain trans “rights” that are deeply controversial, like the “right” of trans-identified males to compete in women’s athletics, the “right” of trans-identified males to serve as rape counselors or officials in battered women’s shelter’s if biological women don’t want them, the “right” of trans-identified males to display their penises in women’s locker rooms, and the “right” of trans-identified males to be put in women’s prisons.”
I think that the idea of a “zero-sum game” or “fixed pie” is helpful. Let’s say that a trans person would feel ill-used if they couldn’t have their way in the issues you list above. OK, that’s understandable. But we must pursue the issue by asking who pays for trans people having their way. It’s ordinary women.
Gay people getting access to marriage doesn’t come at a cost to straight people who want to get married. But trans women getting access to women’s competitions, say, DOES come at a cost to ordinary women. When trans people get a bigger slice of the pie, the remainder–that is, the rights of ordinary women–gets smaller.
Fish does that thing so common in progressive orthodoxy where they hand waive rational challenge of concept by citing any available ‘expert’ claim then demonizing the challenger. It makes them feel better. And so much of the luxury belief agenda is just feeling better.
The awfull problem of a full belly.
I think there are a few inaccuracies or exaggerations in the original letter. It’s still pretty rare in the US for youngsters to have their genitals (as opposed to breasts) removed — I can’t think of any examples. A fair number of those adults who do go on to have “bottom surgery” claim to experience sexual satisfaction. The more significant problem is that children who are given puberty blockers before they’ve experienced puberty and then proceed to cross-sex hormones are very unlikely to ever experience sexual satisfaction.
Fish sneered at the idea that kids are approached by trans activists and “converted,” but an atheist ought to be aware that conversions and pressure can be subtle. A child in a classroom which begins with a “voluntary” prayer and is taught by a teacher with a cross using examples from the New Testament to illustrate various teaching points throughout the day isn’t being converted in the usual sense of focused proselytizing and demands to confess the faith. But it’s attractive and controversial pressure to look within and search for God smuggled in under the guise of children “learning to be accepting of those with Christian beliefs.”
Likewise, children who are taught to be accepting of “those who are transgender” are also receiving messages and cues from gender ideology about the importance of figuring out if they’re a boy or a girl by looking within to find their inner conviction. It’s attractive— and controversial.
Jazz Jennings had bottom surgery at 17. As for sexual satisfaction for those who transition as adults, I’ll take your word for it. I was speaking of children or adolescents.
It’s true that genital surgery on minors is rare. However, I often encounter persons arguing online that it never happens, which definitely isn’t the case.
The article cited below is a good source for some statistics on gender-related surgeries in the US. It compiles data on 48019 individuals who had a gender-related surgery between 2016 and 2020. Of these, 3678 were aged 12 to 18 years, and of those, 3215 received breast/chest surgery, 405 received genital surgery, and 350 received other procedures. It’s frustrating that the authors chose (intentionally?) to set the upper bound for the lowest age category to 18 rather than 17. One can assume that many of the 405 who received genital surgery were 18, but probably not all of them.
Wright JD, Chen L, Suzuki Y, Matsuo K, Hershman DL. National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(8):e2330348. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.30348
As the article below indicates, genital surgery was being performed on persons under age 18 in the US, even when that went against the WPATH standards of care at the time.
Milrod C, Karasic DH. Age Is Just a Number: WPATH-Affiliated Surgeons’ Experiences and Attitudes Toward Vaginoplasty in Transgender Females Under 18 Years of Age in the United States. J Sex Med. 2017 Apr;14(4):624-634. doi: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2017.02.007. Epub 2017 Mar 17. PMID: 28325535.
The evasive and illogical response of Mr. Stark (like his emphasis that the unnamed letter-writer is not a member of AHA) brings to mind something Helen Joyce said a few years ago. Whenever you find that an organization has been captured by gender ideology, if you look a little closer it usually comes to light that someone high up in the organization has a trans kid, or trans nephew, etc. And if the kid has had some irrevocable change made to their body (through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or surgery), which oftentimes is disabling, the adult overseeing this cannot, for their own self-respect and sanity, ever disavow it or ever jump off that bandwagon. So they just can’t really confront the points Jerry brings up.
Agree. That’s why there is no sense in talking to these people. They won’t change their minds. You have to pass laws banning what needs to be banned. Let the AHA bleat and squawk. If the legislature won’t act, well, you tried. Elect a better legislature. Once the Governor signs the bill into law, and the Supreme Court upholds it against the predictable challenges (now unnecessary after Skrmetti?), you don’t need to listen to the AHA ever again. Sweet.
Mr. Fish wrote:
I do recommend to him:
Jay Cohn: The Detransition Rate Is Unknown. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 12 June 2023, volume 52, pages 1937–1952
open access:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02623-5
Benjamin Ryan: How Common Is Detransitioning? May 2, 2025
Never trust someone who says they know precisely how commonly people detransition. Research on the subject, especially pertaining to minors, remains maddeningly hazy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250514215234/https://benryan.substack.com/p/how-common-is-detransitioning
Thanks; I wish I’d known about these references when I responded. Well, now I do, and I’m betting Fish is reading these comments, so he’ll know too.
I feel like the claimed dissatisfaction rates for gender-affirming surgery (1% or so) being up to an order of magnitude below dissatisfaction rates for cancer surgery (variable; a casual search shows between 5- 11%) should by itself raise eyebrows. Being that much lower implies a degree of faith.
‘But if any individual of any age has a “right” to “self-determination,” why did your get your knickers in a twist when Dawkins suggested, as a thought experiment, that Rachel Dolezal might conceivably have a “right” to identify as black if she were white. You may remember that this is one reason the AHA revoked Dawkins’s 2006 “Humanist of the Year Award.”.’
Indeed! I have never seen a satisfactory answer to why self-identification of sex – which is binary and immutable in humans – is acceptable, whilst self-identification of race – a much more nebulous and difficult to determine characteristic – is not. Fish’s response to why this is the case would be very interesting!
The people who were most horrified by Dolezal came from professions and institutions where being a “person of color” can nowadays offer some professional and personal advantages—academia for example often bends backwards for the cause of diversity. So for those people Dolezal was a freerider. But they could not openly admit that, since they had spent so much time talking about how racism was everywhere in American institutions. To admit a more nuanced approach (treating racism as still present in some areas but not as an all-pervasive blight on the land) would in their view weaken the cause of antiracism—and force them to dial back their self-righteousness.
Additionally, “African American” is not simply a skin color but part of a conceptual package involving history and class. By claiming to be African American Dolezal was claiming to be part of a people conceptually defined by their history of enslavement, Jim Crow, and lingering discrimination and underclass status. But even today Americans still go in for the “one drop” idea of race—if you have a black grandmother, you’re black. Dolezal therefore did not have right “credentials” to be black and make herself part of an oppressed/marginalized minority.
Look for the centers of power and the subsequently marginalized sparks across History.
Another thought that just occurred :
Gnosis of Judith Butler’s gender performativity. There is no equivalent way or theory to transform racial impressions by thought alchemy – yet, perhaps.
But gender performativity provides a means to overpower one’s own innate impressions … which might very well be coming from a demiurge in need of exorcism.